NPR: The Banality of Torture

The Banality of Torture

I have been fascinated all morning with Jane Mayer's New Yorker piece about allegations of torture in the CIA's secret prisons. She pieces together the path of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (aka K.S.M.), the admitted mastermind of the Sept. 11 attack, from capture in Pakistan, through secret prisons to Guantanamo.

By the time the CIA got done with him, he had admitted to 31 plots, including the attempted shoe bombing, the Bali nightclub explosion, the 1993 World Trade Center blast and planned attacks on President Clinton, President Carter, the pope and London's Big Ben and Heathrow airport. After he claimed to have personally decapitated Daniel Pearl, Pearl's father told the New Yorker, "Something is fishy. There are a lot of unanswered questions. K.S.M. can say he killed Jesus. He has nothing to lose."

A lot has been written about the alleged use of waterboarding to get the confessions, but Mayer's article details the other psychological techniques likely used by the CIA on K.S.M. One interrogator tells Mayer about inducing "learned helplessness":

It starts with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners' ability to forecast the future -- when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B. model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn't after intelligence.

Mayer documents the precision and ingenuity of CIA techniques. Even innocuous things like varying the size of meals from one day to the next can add to the confusion. And the article goes to show how difficult it can be to regulate interrogation techniques when even mild methods like forced standing and sleep deprivation can be extended to such lengths that only the word "torture" is appropriate. One expert she quotes says:

People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process.

Over at the blog Metafilter, one poster noted that once again real life seems to be imitating the satirical world of The Onion.

- Robert Smith

2:22 PM ET | 08- 6-2007 | permalink

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